Swarm review – screaming blue murder

Is this new Xbox Live Arcade download really the new Pikmin? And if it’s not is it more fun to save the game’s little blue critters or see them suffer?

Swarm (360) – rewarding stupidity

Nintendo has many foibles as a company, but not rushing themselves is usually the one that gets fans upset the most. Shigeru Miyamoto has been talking about a new Pikmin game now for almost four years, and yet diddly and squat is all we’ve seen of it so far. So we can well understand how some people got excited when this Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 download seemed to feature some very similar ideas and visuals.

Swarm isn’t very much like Pikmin though, even though it does involve you directing around large groups of brightly coloured aliens. For starters you’re frequently encouraged to let them die in increasingly gruesome ways, and for seconds it’s not a particularly good game.

The swarmites under you control are little blue blob-like people who are birthed out of a giant alien ovipositor at the beginning of a level – or hatched out of eggs when replenishing lost souls midway through a level. The swarmites are purposefully presented as unintelligent, although the artificial intelligence that sees them all acting semi-independently is actually quite clever.

Whereas Pikmin was a real-time strategy game in disguise Swarm is essentially just a 2D platformer. You control your swarm of 50 as a single entity, with the shoulder buttons either instructing them to fan out or move in close formation. Apart from a jump and interact button that at first seems to be all there is to the controls.

Although developer Hothead Games are clearly trying to make the game seem as accessible as possible, by reducing the number of buttons involved, all they end up doing is confusing things more than usual by mapping multiple abilities to each one.

Performing a dash, forming a vertical column of swarmites and even just judging the length and height of a jump properly takes much longer than it should do to become second nature.

Although at first it seems you’re simply trying to get from one end of a level to the next you’re actually meant to be collecting DNA in order to improve the genetic stock of your less than caring ‘mother’. What this means in practise though is that if you don’t accrue enough points in your first run through you’re made to repeat levels until you’ve farmed enough to unlock some more.

The range of tortures waiting for your swarmites are clearly meant to be amusing but, if only because of the small size of each one on screen, they never reach the imaginative heights of real connoisseurs of violence such as Saw or Itchy & Scratchy.

Worse, the traps are often impossible to anticipate, as the swarmites are sawn in half or dropped into lava. As a result it becomes a game of trial and error not unlike Trials HD, where each new disaster is endured, noted and then avoided the next time round. And even then it’s not easy given the sluggish controls (understandable giving you’re controlling multiple different characters at once – but that doesn’t really forgive it).

Once you do unlock all the levels you realise that one reason for the irritating reliance on repetition is simply the fact that there aren’t many of them. Although the most annoying aspect of the game is the unreasonably deadly boss encounters.

Rather than the cheeky clone it first appears to be this is an admirably original game that just isn’t able to make enough of its many good ideas. It’s frustrating, repetitive and flat out not much fun, often all at the same time.

And yet the twin impulses to both nurture and punish your idiotic charges makes it all more endurable that it should be. Or at least until you realise it’s you being tortured more than them.

In Short: It’s a clever idea but being in charge of a swarm of moronic blue midgets proves a fairly fleeting and frustrating pleasure.

Pros:An unexpectedly original idea that gets most of the basics right, with some clever level design and well-hidden secrets.

Cons:Unlocking new levels and having to repeat old ones is tiresome. Stodgy controls and often impossible-to-anticipate obstacles. Most deaths aren’t very funny.